Science workers

I always dreamed about being a scientist. Today, a few months after getting my PhD, I’m more unsure than ever about how to do science properly. I think that to become a good scientist you need to understand what science is, but, using Lakatos words: Most scientists tend to understand little more about science than fish about hydrodynamics.

How can I become a good scientist if I struggle to define science? In retrospective, I wonder if, nowadays, PhD students acquire the required skills to become scientists. I think that in most of the cases the answer is no. What is more, I think that publication pressure and economical constrains are alienating the porpoise of starting a PhD.

It’s always useful to start from a simple definition when discussing any topic. We can make a reasonable definition of science saying that its objective is to produce theories with explanatory power, that are falsifiable and that have predictive capacity. If we agree on this, we have to concede that a mere description of facts is not considered “scientific” if it does not lead to predictions on the studied topic. I think that it is arguable to say that an average PhD student learns the skills to produce such theories, if any.

 If we visualize the path of a student during his PhD, it will probably be constrained even before starting. Their future years will be determined by the kind of project that their supervisor got funded, which will in turn be constrained by the biases of the funding agencies. The techniques to learn, bibliography to read, problems to solve and, in general, knowledge to acquire is already decided the very moment they enter to the lab. Besides, a clock will start to tic… they have to graduate!  Like a white rabbit in a book from Lewis Carroll, they have to rush to do it on time, while producing a “strong publication record”. As soon as the new PhD student arrives to the lab, they have to start to do experiments, collect data, analyse it, write and submit papers. Once their PhD is done, they have gathered enough knowledge to collect their data and write (or assist to write) their papers, of course, from the perspective of their lab. It is doubtful whether they had time to think about his own questions, whether that approach was the best or not, nor to achieve a proper understanding of the analytical tools that he had used; they can just trust them because their lab (or others, or everybody) has been using them previously. On the other side, they have become a world expert on a very narrow field of science, as well as in the use of certain tools to acquire data. Is this what it means to be a scientist? I don’t think so. In order to be a scientist you need to learn how to make your own questions, think critically and compare competing theories that explain a phenomenon. Learning how to design experiments, collect and analyse data is necessary, but not sufficient, to be a scientist.

Considering this, a new question can emerge, what have I been trained to be? If we put some perspective, the term scientist was created in the beginning of the XIX century. At that time, the term “natural philosopher” was considered old fashioned, as it didn’t accurately describe the systematic acquisition of knowledge to understand nature. In this context, William Whewell suggested the term scientist, as a contraction of science artist. So, returning to the question at the beginning of this paragraph, if I received training in science but not to be a complete scientist, what for? I’d say that most PhD students nowadays are trained as workers, rather than artists. Being a scientist is more than being a science worker. Understanding these difference is crucial, because it means that, in order to be a scientist, we need to acquire extra skills, on top of our work in the lab. It was that moment on which I realized this, that my PhD was not training me as a complete scientist, when I felt farther from being one. On the positive side, being aware of these flaws allowed me to work on them, trying to get all the abilities that I need to move from working in science to being a scientist.

If I had to say which was the most useful resources beyond my doctoral thesis that I used to work towards being a better scientist, they are straightforward to me: Reading tons of papers, specially from out of my field, and reading philosophy. Reading papers out of your field helps to get a bigger picture, learn new techniques and different conceptual frameworks. As an example, the main tool of my neuroscience PhD was originally designed to study sea waves. On top of reading more scientific papers, I think that the most valuable thing a PhD student can do is to read philosophy (of science). As I said previously, I think that I (we) didn’t receive a proper training to improve my critical thinking, neither about creating new theories or comparing among competing research programmes. In brief, learning to solve questions is not very productive if you don’t learn how to make good questions. Philosophy helps us to make better questions because it precedes science in the seek for knowledge. Russell discussed that philosophy talks about problems that at that given time are not reachable by scientific approaches; it provides a guideline to produce new theories and, later on, move the philosophical problem to the field of science, where it will eventually be solved.